A Thousand Beautiful Things
by Resmiranda
Summary: A string of vignettes featuring Sesshoumaru and Rin. Jaken can come too. 12 parts. WIP.
1. Waveway

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_"The cure for anything is salt-water – sweat, tears, or the sea."_  
**--Isak Dinesea**

**I. Waveway**

So he brings her down to the sea, little dried leaf bones wrapped in her paper body, cradled in his arm because she will plummet if he does not hold her. Her sick scent curls in his nose, makes him almost sick himself, and the barely perceptible motion of the dragon beneath him roils his stomach. Jaken clings to his pelt and snores.

He is _tired_. He dreams of sleep.

When they finally reach the ocean, it is still not good enough. From out of dim remembered times, when he was just a boy - _so long ago_ - he drags dusty recollections of islands to the southwest, where it is always warm even when winter grips the land. He remembers traveling down and down with his mother who loved to journey, who loved the sea, who shook down her long blue-silver hair in the rain when the typhoons swelled over the sky.

Who wandered until her feet forgot the way back and she was lost.

In his embrace, Rin trembles, is so tiny, so small -

It is probably too late to leave her as food for wolves, so they fly low over the waves and into the sunlit country of the south.

_He thinks that it has been too long since his last visit. He thinks that he is tired of the cold. He thinks he could revive her if need be._

They settle on a secluded beach, but it's still not as warm as he would like. Without being told, Jaken gathers firewood, while high on shore Sesshoumaru bends and kneels, placing her in the warm dry sand.

_Next winter,_ he thinks, _she will be warm._

The fire is built. He sits and leans against a palm tree. Before settling into the stillness of a demon that is dreaming, he places her head on his long trailing sleeve.

She sleeps for days, only waking to stumble into the sheltering arms of the trees and to sip the fishy broth Jaken has boiled. Sesshoumaru does not ask how Jaken learned to make soup, but the little toad hops on the sand beneath his gaze anyway.

"I'm making it up as I go along!" he shouts, indignant, as though he has been caught in a heinous act and was melting beneath his guilty conscience.

Sesshoumaru says nothing. He turns away and watches the sea.

The days slink by in the roll of the tides, and it occurs to him slowly that should he live as long as he believes he will - that is, _forever_ - he will one day cross the ocean. The thought has a tiny thrill to it, like the spark before the fire, or the pebble before the avalanche, as if the act of thinking had any weight beyond the heaviness of breath.

On the tenth day the sun is setting in fiery brilliance on the waters, each wave on the endless sea rising up and flashing once before sinking down again, and it is at once different and exactly the same as the iron grey ocean in the north. How far would he drift, how far could he wander, if he were on the waves?

On the fourteenth day he rises and walks down to the tide line, and then into the wet sand, and then down to the water to watch the waves swirl around his feet. He can feel them dragging him out to sea, into the endless undulating ocean, where all that lingers drowns.

"Sesshoumaru-sama."

Without difficulty, he lets his eyes slide down and to his side to see Rin, bright-eyed, standing next to him and letting the waves tickle her naked toes. He can still hear the rattling of her lungs, but it is faint now, a single bone rolling in a clay pot. When they are again where they belong, she will have warmer clothes, and shoes. It was careless - no, more _thought-less_ - to have forgotten how fragile she was, how susceptible to cold and heat.

_How brief she is, and how difficult to hold thoughts of her - like trying to grasp the sea only to have it slip away through his fingers. Like the sea, it is _she_ who holds _him_ by the slightest of tethers. He could break it, if he so chose._

And now Jaken has run down the beach to her, squawking that it is still too cool, and too cool to be in the water, and what did he ever do to deserve such a disobedient whelp? She only laughs, grabs his little resisting hand, and drags him through the shallow eddies, leaving tiny ripples in her wake that are gone as soon as he spies them. She flashes, bright, limber little legs splashing through the tide.

Rin runs out of breath quickly, and a jabbering Jaken leads her again toward the trees and their little campsite and the light of the fire.

Sesshoumaru thinks that he has all the time in the world to walk the waters.


	2. What Fish Feel

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_What fish feel,  
birds feel, I don't know--  
the year ending._  
**--Matsuo Basho**

**II. What Fish Feel**

"I don't know," he says, or would say if he ever admitted to ignorance. Because he never shows weakness, Sesshoumaru remains silent.

In the back of her throat, Rin makes that strange noise, half-grunt, half-whine, that she employs on the rare occasions when he frustrates her. She can tell he doesn't have an answer for her. Idly, she wishes he would just say it instead of attempting to remain distant and inscrutable, ice cold and above all her petty questions, and petty questions are only petty, of course, if he has no answer for them.

She wonders how long it takes for demons to grow up.

The fish in front of her is flopping against the grass and gasping its last, because, for the first time, she doesn't think she can eat it. She'd never thought about it before, but it is dying in front of her and suddenly suffering seems like something that crosses species, that it is the same for everyone like it is for her, and now that she's thought it she cannot unthink it again.

Her stomach is twisting in on itself, but Rin can't quite bring herself to do the final honors. It seems cruel, or unnecessary, as if there were something else she could eat that wouldn't suffer the agonies of dying that she still remembers in dreams.

She is still steeling her nerve when suddenly the fish is without a head and without any more pain, and only the slightest gleam on the tips of his claws belie the action she could not see.

_Sesshoumaru moves so quickly sometimes that she thinks perhaps she imagined the world before the motion - that the fish has always been without a head and she just didn't notice. It is as if the world has always been the way he wanted it to be, and she simply could not see until he swept away the dust, brushed the cobwebs from her eyes, parted the veil that had obscured it from her until now. He moves as quickly as revelation._

"Sesshoumaru-sama..." she begins, because just his name is sometimes enough to make him speak.

"Ask Jaken," he tells her, which is what he says when he is... not annoyed, or bothered, or tired of her, but rather... manipulative. As if he unconsciously rearranges the world into what he desires. She cannot defy it. He's had far more practice at the art of arranging the universe than she.

Rin turns to the dozing toad next to her. "Jaken-sama, do all animals feel pain the way we do?"

Without even cracking an eye, he grunts and says, "That is not something you should care about. It is yourself you should be concerned with." It is his usual casual lesson in callousness, and doesn't answer her question at all.

Impatient, Rin gives his shoulder a shake. "Jaken-sama," she wheedles.

He was always so easy to excite. In seconds, he is on his feet and hopping up and down in front of her. "Foolish child! I don't care and it doesn't matter! Stop pestering me with your stupid questions!"

Rin frowns. The days are long gone when she was almost Jaken-sized. Now, if Sesshoumaru were to embrace her - _and he never will again_ - the top of her head would brush the underside of the cold metal spikes on his armor. "I'm not a foolish child any more," she begins to say, but he cuts her off.

"You are! You are young and you know nothing, and I am trying to sleep!"

Sighing inwardly, Rin picks up the sharp stick she had prepared for the fish and pokes Jaken with it instead. "Does this hurt?" she asks, genuinely curious.

With his staff, Jaken knocks the stick out of her hand. She watches it whirl away and into the grass as he continues. "Of course it doesn't!" he cries. "I'm not as weak as that! Now let me sleep!" With a noise that sounds distinctly like, "Humph!" he stalks a little ways away and slides down into the shade of the trees. Within seconds he is gently snoring, though she can't tell if he's faking it or not.

Rin sighs again before pushing herself to her feet and retrieving her stick. When she returns, she kneels down next to her headless fish but hesitates before preparing it.

Deliberately and carefully, she holds her arm in front of her and stabs at the soft white underside.

"Ow!" She is surprised, although she doesn't know why, to find that it hurts her. She should have guessed; after all, Jaken is always saying that she is a weak human, but she never really thought about it like this until now. She hurts. Absently her fingers brush the silver scar on her cheek before she detects a movement from the corner of her eye and turns abruptly to face it.

Sesshoumaru is gazing at her with eyes so clear she thinks she might fall into them.

_He is still and white, and the world moves around him. Only the gentle swell and fall of his hair, the slight movement of his fine clothes tells her that he is not a statue, that he is flesh, that he moves through time as well instead of standing still while all around him flows._

She thinks that it is perhaps true, that not all pain is equal, for he does not stir or act injured even when he is bleeding. He does not feel sensations the same way she does.

And then she thinks that he doesn't _feel_ the same way she does, that all her love and devotion, all her girlish dreams and yearnings are being poured into a great chasm, dark and empty, lost forever and never to be returned.

Or maybe not even that. Perhaps it is as if she is loving him, and he cannot recognize it. Or even worse, that he is not the right shape to receive it, and the distance between them, human girl and demon lord, can never be crossed. An accident - no more or less - of birth.

He is still staring, clear-eyed. He would never let anything harm her, never let anything touch her, and yet he has not moved to take the stick away. He seems curious. He appears to be waiting for something.

But then again, who knows what a demon feels?


	3. Each Grey Morning

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

  
_Peace, Peace, she cannot hear  
Lyre or sonnet,  
All my life is buried here,  
Heap earth upon it._  
**--Oscar Wilde**, "Requiescat"

**III. Each Grey Morning**

Inuyasha laughs long and hard, and it sounds like the echo of a hundred years tumbling over one another. 

"I am waiting," he says after he has recovered, panting a little. 

Though wishes are ephemeral and foolish, a human thing, Sesshoumaru wishes only that he could steal the breath that escapes between his brother's teeth, pin it with his claws, trap it in his hands, wrap it around his fingers and present it to her. Breath is, after all, the only gift he has ever been able to give. He is a poverty, a barrenness, except for the wind that howls inside his hollow body.

It is cruelty that his only gift should have failed him when most he needed it.

The clouds are gathering near. The naked trees, burnt husks of their former selves, scrape against the sky, and though he does not care the air is cold enough to shatter, like that winter when he traveled south and south again.

He is settling into stillness.

"How long?" he says, his voice telling him that he is still alive.

Inuyasha shrugs and places another block of wood on the tree stump before slicing it cleanly in half. The action is so pure and simple, and so out of reach.

"Until she comes back," his brother says. Beneath his skin his muscles bunch and slide as he methodically prepares for the winter, and this winter is one of hundreds he will see as he trips down through the centuries to find her again.

"What if she never comes back?" The cold is in his mouth, curling over his tongue and snaking into his lungs, and he is suddenly so, so tired he thinks he may lay down where he stands and slumber for a thousand years.

"Then I'll wait forever," Inuyasha replies, and in that moment Sesshoumaru wants nothing more than to slice him open and bleed him dry. He wants to kill him, because what Inuyasha really means is that he will wait until he dies, and that is nowhere near forever. Envy claws up his throat, burns his tongue, strangling him with rage and all his choked and cherished need, with all his sad devotion.

Inuyasha will die, but Sesshoumaru feels the end of the world rumble in his bones.

"But she will," Inuyasha is saying. "She has a soul, and it will be born again, or I'll find her when I am old and she is still fifteen. But it doesn't really matter which one happens. I can wait."

"She will be reborn," Sesshoumaru repeats. The words taste like pain and poison, like loving lies. The wind rips through his clothing, tossing his hair, and he almost turns his face to it, almost closes his eyes and vanishes into the darkness of his head.

At the edge of his hearing, Inuyasha gives a cough. "You're welcome to wait with me," he says. It is a queer olive branch to offer, but it is still the best he has.

Sesshoumaru says nothing. He is thinking, rolling great hollow thoughts around in his head, listening to the silent cacophony they make.

"A soul," he finally says out loud, the sound low and dark on the wind. 

_And he remembers that night beneath the moon, in the cold, when he felt little fingers creeping through the chambers of his heart, turning him inside out, drawing the border between regret and resurrection. He thinks his little human girl, his little mortal, was always wiser than he guessed. He thinks she might have known what she was doing. _

He thinks if she returns, she will find him and he will --

Inuyasha breathes on his hands and flicks his ears, as if to shake off the sleepy frost. "It's going to be a tough winter," he says.

"Yes," Sesshoumaru replies.

The icy wind slips razors on his skin, and he cannot discern the difference between grief and dying, for he has never known either and they seem to be one and the same.

He has nothing left to say. His words have run dry; he is picked clean, can no longer speak, except for a name and that name he will not voice until its owner returns.

Sesshoumaru turns and walks away to find his own aimless aim. Maybe, in some other time, he will return and they will wait together, but now the roadless sky is calling him, and he thinks to wander for just a while.

He hopes his feet will remember the way back.

_She is elsewhere, far away, but he knows that she is there for he can feel her casting back her shadow, and it moves upon him, over him, in him, he need only walk it to find her, he need only take a step and all that starts with one, need only follow into the deep and dark, the secret shadowed, and she is elsewhere, waiting for -- _


	4. A House that Falls

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,  
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:  
being forever  
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls._  
**--Galway Kinnell**, "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight"

**IV. A House That Falls**

When she opens her eyes, she thinks that she is still dreaming. This is the sight that greets her when she opens her eyes in dreams as well, the sight she revisits after the teeth – but no. Subtle differences – the armor, the slight hint of emotion so faint only she would see it, the clean and ordered hair and clothes – tell her that she is awake now, and no longer caught in wolf's jaws. Her breath rushes through her teeth; her heart beats its wings against the cage of her body.

She looks up into Sesshoumaru's pale face and golden eyes, like fireflies on the moon, and swallows hard.

"I didn't mean to wake you up, Sesshoumaru-sama," she says between pants, wishing that her dreams also did not cause her to leap from the land of sleep and into the world.

Sesshoumaru says nothing, and she becomes even more aware of the difference between remembrance and reality. He is not holding her, he is standing, and she can see the night sky all around.

He merely shakes his head, and she has to struggle to remember which of her words he is answering.

"Oh," is all she can think to say.

He doesn't move away. Instead he is still, pinning her to the ground with the weightless force of his gaze. Rin wishes she were small again, small enough to be scared, small enough to curl against his pelt, small enough to seek comfort, instead of this difficult size, half-girl, half-woman, that insists she is strong.

Beneath her back is the slow and steady rhythm of Aun's lungs, and the swathe of blankets around her smells like fresh grass. They are comforting things, each one stilling her heart and her fluttering breath, until he opens his mouth.

He has been sinking into silence as speaking becomes unnecessary, so the sudden sound dropped into the space between them crawls across her bones.

_It calls up wisps of memory, of other men that she has known, although they are all but forgotten now. Each one has been erased by long white fingers, replaced with long white hair. He is so pale that he shines, yet his voice is dark. It is deep, vast, shadowed._

His voice has walls so high she wonders if she will ever scale them, if she will ever find her way over and into the place where voice and thought are one, into the place where words slumber. 

"Stand," he says, and she does so, though something in her balks at the curt command. She does not need his coldness. Cold only numbs; it does nothing to heal. Rin clutches the blankets tighter around her shoulders and rises before him.

Her neck is stiff and she winces as tilts her head back to look him in the eye. The top of her head is level with his shoulder now, and it's funny, but he still seems as impossibly tall as he did when she was a little girl. They are motionless for a moment.

Then a breeze lifts his hair, and she is suddenly seized with the thought that she will be caught up and drift away, as light as a leaf, and he will still be standing here, still and smooth as glass. Fear fills her, and then she has drawn close enough that the space between them is the space of a breath, and her hand is gripping the end of his empty sleeve, the poorest of anchors and the crudest of gestures.

_Childish,_ she thinks. _Childish._

Rin makes as though to move away, and then his hand is in her hair, holding her in place. He looms, and she freezes.

Very slowly, as though not to frighten her, he releases her hair and places cold fingertips against her forehead. The touch is so feather-light that she would not have been aware of it but for the sudden shock of cold across her brow. It is as if he is bloodless, and she thinks, for a moment, that maybe he is.

Gently he trails his fingers down – _claws, the tips of his claws chasing after_ – down the soft slope of her brow, brushing against the corners of her eyelids, slipping over the ridge of her eyebrows, and then the tips of his fingers are closing her eyes, stealing her warmth and her sight.

_She notices, with a small flash of something purple and green and bitter, that he is sliding over the high bones of her cheeks, down and inward, never touching the scar just below. Perhaps he is wary of releasing the secrets sealed there._

She feels him lean in closer.

"Do not dream of wolves," he says. His words are soft as the wings of a butterfly, and rock her to the core.

"How?" she demands, harsh against him. Older, she is no longer able to slip into his will and let it carry her. "_How?_"

Sesshoumaru draws back. Rin opens her eyes in time to see him turn and walk away, up the little hill in front of them. At the crest he stops. Drawing Toukijin from its resting place, he stands against the sky.

She sinks to the ground, all her love and resentment mingling in her throat, and they taste sour. As she falls into sleep, she wonders when the day shall come when she can no longer tell one from the other.


	5. Ashes to Cradle

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_Do I dare  
Disturb the universe?  
In a minute there is time  
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse._  
**T. S. Eliot**, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

**V. Ashes to Cradle**

Eternity is the problem and not the solution he imagined it to be, and the problem is not the mistake.

It is so strange. The habit of making mistakes is not his, and it is a peculiar sensation to search for the thing that went wrong, to look for the thread that traces back and back, to the moment where he could have chosen the other path. And even though so many paths lead away from this crooked trail it is difficult to know which one he should have taken, which one he could walk without his foolish actions stalking behind him, shadowing his footsteps.

Every moment is a chance to correct it, and yet he never does.

He is not even quite certain what has gone awry, only that it went awry with Rin and her girlish laugh and her gap-toothed smile, only that she peeled away something essential with her little fingers. She wound ribbons of him around her tiny hands, stowed them away inside herself, wrapped him around her heart and held him fast.

Sesshoumaru turns his eyes away from the sky and glances back over his shoulder to where Rin is doing the washing and joking - slightly saucily - with Jaken. She is smiling wide, her sleeves tied back, and one could almost believe that she is just another village woman doing her chores were it not for the demon sitting next to her. She looks beautiful. She looks happy.

He can see that she is dying. 

Not immediately, not right now, but already she appears older than he, even though the reality is far different. She is fully grown, and when she picks up the little squirming toad to give him a hug, there is a flash of something matronly, something missed that cannot be regained.

_Just a sweep of the blade and all has been dismantled; his soul is scattered, his mind is in pieces, his heart is --_

The passing of time, the doors of heaven that may only be opened with a sword, the sweet soft fancies that whisper maybe_ or _possibly_ - all conspire against him, all of them lie so prettily that he believes, for countless endless, horrifying moments, that there is nothing to fear, and nothing to regret._

When could he have escaped? He could have left her forever in the village she ran to when she was angry and rebellious. He could have left her in the snow to be food for youkai. He could have left her to drown in a stream. He could have left her to Naraku. He could have never drawn his sword and brought her back from the land of the dead.

He could kill her. It would take nothing to do so. It would take nothing to turn back the ten thousand mistakes of a moment. Nothing at all.

Rin splashes water on Jaken and laughs, tossing her head back, flipping her hair over her shoulder, and just below the ridge of her jaw pumps her lifeblood. It snakes down her throat, thrums and flows just beneath the surface, the most fragile of things. It will be effortless.

She didn't see him coming - he knows this because she gasps in some strange startlement, and then he has tangled his claws in her hair, turned her head, and then she is awkwardly cradled against him. His claws have missed, but his teeth will not.

_Her hair is rich and brown, it glitters red and gold and silver in the sun, her scent is light and fresh, her smile bright, her eyes kind - she is and is not all the thousand beautiful things she calls into existence, and it is the hollow of her throat that distracts him in the crucial moment. A fragile, paper-thin valley nestled in the landscape of her body, and he thinks - so insanely, for just a breath - that he could live there forever. If he could do this, if he could do that, if he could if he could if he could --_

-- he would let nothing of her go, ever.

But it is already too late, too late. Her youth is gone, and she is the best and worst thing that has ever happened. The whim of a second on a muddy path in a dark forest, and the universe has shattered. He should never have turned around, he should have never brought her back, he should have sent her away a thousand times by now. 

He should have killed her the moment he realized the enormity of what he had done, but by then, of course, it was too late.

"Sesshoumaru-sama?" 

Her voice is warm in his ear, and he thinks he detects a tremor, far beneath, but he has probably imagined it. She doesn't have - never had, really - the sense to be afraid.

He is to blame, but he has faltered so many times that one more misstep doesn't seem to matter.

Her hair slides through his claws as he releases her and draws back. Rin blinks up at him, questioning, and with the curious pang that only she can bring he turns away without her blood on his claws, without her life on his tongue. He still thinks _maybe_, or _possibly_. Another mistake, but one he has bought the luxury of making, and he knows he will pay for that privilege all his life.


	6. The Other Side of the Sky

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_My heart went fluttering with fear  
Lest you should go, and leave me here  
To beat my breast and rock my head  
And stretch me sleepless on my bed.  
Ah, clear they see and true they say  
That one shall weep, and one shall stray  
For such is Love's unvarying law...  
I never thought, I never saw  
That I should be the first to go;  
How pleasant that it happened so!_  
**-Dorothy Parker,** "Surprise"

**VI. The Other Side of the Sky**

"So I'm going now," she says, inanely, as if he could not see the tiny bundle of her few belongings, as if he could not smell the apprehension on her breath. It is ridiculous that she feels the need to tell him anything. Surely he already knows. 

He says nothing. 

The silence stirs her toes, shuffling in place to nowhere. She shifts awkwardly, her feet still bare, hardened from so many years chasing the soles of his shoes into the world and out again, before she realized, before she grew into _this_. Now, half a life away from when he pulled her down from the other side of the sky and gave her breath again, she is cramped inside her skin. Now that she is more than half-grown - _but not there yet_ - she understands. 

Painfully, she feels as though she has been put together wrong, as though she is in the wrong body, the wrong story, the wrong _life_, so she stands, knock-kneed, uncertain, now that she is older and can understand what has happened to her; now that she truly realizes what they are. 

_Ah, yes:_ the peasant maiden and the youkai lord - a contrast so bright it hurts to think upon it - and between them is a canyon so deep she dare not attempt to cross, dare not descend for fear she will never come up again. Sometimes she can't even see the other side. 

_The space between them is so wide, she thinks, that they may as well be standing back to back._

Yet here they are, face to face. Funny, but she always thought that _he_ would be the one to leave _her_, and even now she half-wishes to abandon this mission. She knows, though, that some things can only be found when one is alone. 

_Once,_ she remembers suddenly. Once, when she was younger, she wanted to stay with him forever, but now... now she is not so certain any longer. There are things she misses, hollows in her that she cannot fill, a restless angry yearning crawling under her hair, and if she could just _get away_ from him she believes that could stretch out and become herself, that she could fill those caverns inside that ache with what she lacks. 

She is troubled, full of fog and wishes, only wants to _be_... 

...she knows not what. Needs to find out. 

But she cannot do it here; that much is certain, for he fills the world and makes it his own, spreads his strong, tapered fingers over the universe and suddenly all is as he wishes it to be. A potter, nudging clay into shape; a god, sweeping the stars into place. 

Yet she wants her own piece of the world, a place that he has not coaxed into his desires. 

She is tired of being made. 

Ready to go, she waits for him to say something, but he does not. Instead, he inhales deeply, though so subtly she would not have seen it if she had not been his for half her life. He is seeking out her scent. 

_And what secrets does he smell upon her - ? _

- can he smell her fear? she thinks, the notion small and quiet amongst the riot of thought in her head, but no, that is a silly question, of course he can, and she is scared, so scared, and so, so determined; he must know, he must_ know this, and she imagines that she smells red and silver, like lightning and rain, like war cries and death knells, what do secrets smell of - _

He will never tell. He holds her mysteries close, written beneath his skin in starry ink she cannot see, in faded languages she can never learn. 

She is leaving, though. Perhaps now she can plumb her own depths, or find another who will do it for her. 

And she thinks: it does not matter if there will be another, for he was the first. 

It is so strange that he should be her first for so very many things. He owns her first breath, her first word, her first step - he owns them all, because he conjured her back out of the land of the dead and into his embrace, and when he rose she followed him, little feet slapping down on a muddy path, on the road that led over the river and out of hell. 

She remembers glancing down and trying to trace the trail of his footprints, only to discover that he leaves none. 

And now she is finished with following. 

_She feels so tiny, so small... _

Does he know that she will miss him? Can he even understand what it means to carve out a bit of unhappiness and wind it around another? Can he comprehend what it means to long for someone gone, to always be a little bloody, a little wounded, a little less whole? 

And, if he can, will it make a difference? 

If he can, will he waste a little thread of regret just for her? 

_If he can, would she even want him to?_

He is still staring at her, calm and gold and silver, and suddenly more indecipherable than she has ever seen him. 

She thinks: she has had enough. 

Shuffling in place once more she sets her bundle down at her feet. 

"Well!" Rin says brightly. "Time to say goodbye!" 

_Goodbye._

Refusing to cry, she turns to Jaken and, before he can run away, she bends down, plucks him from the ground, and hugs him tight. 

He struggles to break free, but not very much. 

When she finally sets him down, well-squeezed, well-loved, he does not even scold her. It is sweet, in its own way, and even though his eyes are cast down she feels a smile live and die on her lips, just for him. 

Then she turns back to her lord, to her Sesshoumaru-sama, who shields and traps her, tends and binds her, all at once. 

"I have to go now," she tells him, and he blinks, very slowly. Then he surprises her by speaking, though she should have known what he would tell her all along. 

"Do as you wish," he says, has _always_ said, and then turns so that she can no longer see his face, as if that would make a difference in what she could see there. 

For a moment her bitter adoration crowds against her teeth, damming her words before she sweeps it away in a cold, tight fury. 

"I will," she replies. 

Rin picks up her bundle, turns her heels, and walks off, down the grassy hill, in the direction of cookfires, in the direction of normal, in the direction of _away._

She does not turn to look at him, and even as she does she knows that she will wonder, for the rest of her life, if he watched her leave. 


	7. Who Clipped the Lion's Wings?

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_Each year I lived I watched the fissure  
Between what was and what I wished for  
Widen, until there was nothing left  
But the gulf of emptiness.  
Most men have not seen the world divide,  
Or seen, it did not open wide,  
Or wide, they clung to the safer side.  
But I have felt the sundering like a blade. _  
**Galway Kinnell**, "Conversation at Tea"

**VII. Who Clipped the Lion's Wings?**

High above, lightning skitters and cowers in the clouds, afraid of the wild world beneath it, of what might happen should it descend from the heights, kiss the earth, and vanish.

_Just like all storms._

Behind her there are huts and people and children and a life worth living under her own command, but she won't go back there. Instead she smiles and looks to the sky, and awaits the rain and the thunder and the sudden breath that pulls away like the ground from the bird that lifts its wings -

He is out there.

Rin wonders if he knows she can feel him, if he knows how his presence has tugged her gently back and back again, like a tide, like the wind, like his ever-longing hidden heart. It has been three years, but she knows he has not left her side yet, and he never will.

If she stays here any longer, then they will both be crushed. The time has come to pay her debts.

She said goodbye to no one, not even the old woman who took her in, but she must have known anyway. There is a bundle of food, wrapped with care, on her back now, and Rin does not let herself think about the hands that made it. She is ready.

She is ready.

Her kimono is clean and well-mended and her hair is combed and styled simply. Her feet are bare, poised to follow his invisible footsteps once more, as if she had never left.

She is not the same, though. Little things - hands hard from mending garments torn, limbs long and strong from toil in the fields, a body full and fallow - weigh oddly.

For the briefest of moments, she wonders if he will remember her, if he will still see the budding young woman who tried to tame herself, if he will recall the girl who thought she could take her life and make it her own with a new caregiver and a useful trade and a little hut and simple clothes and fresh water from the well on cold spring mornings as the golden light of the dawn spills down through the trees to catch the rising mist - 

_- if he will still know the child who did not know her eyes would always be wide and waiting -_

- and he comes down from the night.

The wind whips his lightning hair, his clothes swell and fall like clouds.

He doesn't speak. 

Gently, he lands, his feet making no sound. The moon on his brow is dark against the paleness of his skin, and beneath it his eyes hold hers.

And even now she can still see that barest of movements, that slight tilt of the head when he seeks her scent, the scent of her - of the young woman, of the girl, of the child - who never meant to leash the sky.

So.

_This is the lie:_ once, he brought her out of the land of the dead. Her life was what he gave to her. The debt she owes him is his life in return.

That is what she will tell him, when he asks, which he never will.

And this is the truth: _because really, it is the other way around. Really, his life is hers, and her life is his._

A life so vast, for a life so brief.

Such an achingly unfair trade. 

He is waiting.

Rin smiles.

Then she steps into the night beyond the village, and he turns and walks away.

_And perhaps in her heart there is just a touch of selfishness, too, knowing now what she could have had there, behind her, in warm domesticity: a life carved into warm wood, a life close and crowded with family and friendship, a life tinged yellow and orange with hearthfire. A whole life, lived in a tiny circle of light, so small, so bright -_

She follows, all her love and pity on her tongue, all her happy debt before her. A life for a life for a lifetime.

_- while outside in the night, his thunder rattles her cowardly heart._


	8. Where Old Oblivions Gather

**_A Thousand Beautiful Things_  
by  
Resmiranda**

_Now I must nurse my courage in a sling  
I dream the ancient skies are ripening_  
**- Galway Kinnell**, "Conversation at Tea"

**VIII. Where Old Oblivions Gather**

_Except tonight._

The problem is eternity. The mistake is devotion.

It is his nature, no more or less. He looks human, but he is not. He is youkai, but he is still more than that, and his nature is his downfall.

Stained with melancholy madness, he circles her in her refuge, in the village she inhabits where she is rebellious and angry and longing for human company, when all he ever wanted for her, for himself, for _her_, was -

She has crippled him, hobbled his feet, wounded him and bled him out, dismembered him - and he _welcomed_ it, this destructive thing that slices him to ribbons even as it sustains him. Folly, foolishness. He cradled her in his arms and did nothing as she ran her tiny hands over him and brushed away his determination, swept his resistance to the wind, ruined him completely.

Yet he haunts the forests beyond her village, and waits for her, longs to bring her back even as he struggles against the thing that she has done to him.

But he will not. That small scrap of dignity will remain to him, no matter how badly he wishes to shed it.

Her absence drives him weary wild.

Some days, Jaken is insistent that he leave, that he not humble himself this way, and that is fine. Some days, Jaken does not bother to speak to him at all, and that, too, is fine. He has all the time in the world to do the things he must, all the time in the world to walk the waves. But just a little longer.

_Just a little longer._

His years are made long with waiting, made heavy with emptiness, and still she will not come.

Each day, he lives inside his mistake. The mistake, the stumble, the fall, the landing - pain and panic, unintended, avoidable, cursed missteps. Most can be mended, patched with care until all is as it had been before, or near enough that it makes no difference, but some take longer, look less like the pristine past and more like the shattered future.

Even mended, the ghosts of his mistakes live on, because he _remembers._

Each night he wanders the forests, wondering how far he can go before she stops him. The further he runs, the tighter her hold, until he cannot breathe, until he cannot see, until he cannot struggle any longer and he turns back, lifting clawed fingers to scritch scritch scratch against the air, a mute appeal, too stoic to speak, too prideful to beg, back to wait for her to remember what he is and why he is here.

Except tonight.

In the storm and the lightening and the wild wind, he felt her. Not the hole of her, not the phantom limb of her, not the ghost, but _her._

And even though he sensed her coming, walking through the darkness and the rain, even though he feels her, he didn't quite expect -

_- at the edge of the village, atop the brink of her life, over the wall of his thoughts, on the tip of his tongue -_

- to see her there.

From the sky, he watches her standing beneath the storm, and he knows she waits for him.

He knows this, because he knows so well, so well what waiting looks like. It looks like an agonizing lift of the chin. It looks like the hopeless shine of the eyes. It looks like the useless years and constant admonitions and the slow halt of all that was meant to go on.

It looks like the end.

So he goes to her.

And as he does, he thinks: if he could open her veins, if he could open her body to him, he would search inside her for the piece of him she stole and take it back, become whole again.

But that is impossible. The piece of him that would allow him to dismantle her and reclaim what he was is the piece she holds, safe, away from him in her body that he will never touch, in her hands, those fragile fingers he reluctantly cherishes. He would sooner draw his own beating heart from his body and devour it himself than see her harmed. It is his nature.

When he meets the end of the world, he will not be himself. He will be _otherwise_, alien, unrecognizable, and all because he allowed her to crawl into his bones and make him hers. He will never belong to himself again. He has been lost.

This is the mistake that will live forever, for she is hers is herself is her own, and he is a fool who failed to remember the one thing he should never do.

_There is nothing like a dog's devotion._


End file.
